Pulse Was More Than Just a Gay Club: It Was a Place Where We Didn't Have to Hide

A writer revisits the Orlando nightclub that became the site of the most horrific mass shooting in our recent history.

On a normal Saturday night in Orlando, four men, in their 20s and early 30s, hopped in an Uber to a night club called Pulse, one of their regular spots. Three of them lived in the same apartment complex, and going out together felt natural—a ritual they needed to escape the rote monotony of daily bullshit. On the way there, they laughed and talked and argued about the merits of veggie dogs. Upon entering Pulse, the friends joined their chosen "family," a term members of the LGBT community often use to describe ourselves.

But this club, one of the most popular gay venues in central Florida, was more than just a place to buy a few drinks and flirt with members of the same sex (or whomever we found attractive that night). Early on in my undergrad career, Pulse had been a part of my regular going-out rotation; Florida’s best drag queens performed there, and you could count on the DJ to play good music. Back then, the club was tiny in a charming way, and consisted of three distinct rooms—one chill, the others high energy. On the back patio, I once had a friendly argument with a gay man who said we “were no different than straight guys.” Pulse, and other predominantly gay places, became opportunities for us figure things out—who we were, how we wanted others to see us.

And as Saturday night wound down–around 2 A.M.—two of the friends took a break from dancing on the main floor. They went to the bathroom together. As the music played, the friends heard a strange noise, something like a firecracker. Clack clack clack. Many patrons thought it was merely part of the music before they realized it was gunshots. Gunshots that “kept going.” People sprinted for the exits, and tried to put as much physical distance between themselves and the club as possible. “We just wandered the streets trying to figure everything out,” said one of the friends, who asked to not be identified. “Our friends were still inside, and we kept on calling them.”

One was our mutual friend Drew, a technology buff and Eurovision lover, who I had known for nearly a decade. The other was Drew’s boyfriend, Juan, 22-years old. Inside the club, gunman Omar Saddiqui Mateen continued his rampage. He stayed in there until almost 5 A.M.

A victim’s father told me that Mateen shot at people lying on the floor. His son—who he called Angel—had his arm trampled from people trying to run for the exits, shot three times as he was holding a woman’s hand.

“It was a barricaded hostage situation at the time,” said Orlando Police Chief John Mina in an interview posted to the department’s Twitter page. “There were talk of bombs and explosives, and when that talk became a crisis for us was when we knew there would be an imminent loss of life. That made us go in.”

A victim’s father told me that Mateen shot at people lying on the floor. His son—who he called Angel—had his arm trampled from people trying to run for the exits, shot three times as he was holding a woman’s hand.

It wasn't until police began swarming Pulse that Drew's friend understood the scope, and the magnitude of the night started to sink in. “I didn’t expect it to be as bad as it was,” he said. “I saw sadness everywhere.”

By the time I had arrived in Orlando on Sunday evening, the giant American flag off I-4 had been lowered to half-mast. President Obama had identified the shooting as an “act of Terror” and “hate.” Forty-nine victims have been confirmed dead; a reported 53 injured. The worst mass shooting in U.S. history happened at a gay club in Central Florida on Latin night.

I had met Drew as part of Orlando’s tight-knit LGBT community, so most of the posts I saw pouring into my feeds tracked the latest on him. But many others were still missing. His boyfriend, Juan, would soon be confirmed to have undergone surgery, but he ultimately didn’t survive. He was one of the first names confirmed dead on the list put out by the Orlando Police Department.

Later that night, friends gathered near Drew’s apartment. A few of them had been in the club. Vigils began forming across Orlando—at Parliament House and Lake Eola—the state, the country, the world. As the night wore on, we tried to piece together the fragments of information we were fed. The news played on TV; the same news seemed to repeat itself. People checked their phones for any updates, which were hard to come by as investigators were still trying to identify the bodies.

During the next days, weeks, and months we will continue to sift through information. We will grapple with questions like how several different screening processes–including the ones done by the FBI and state of Florida–couldn’t prevent a deranged man with a history of violence from obtaining an AR-15. But initially on that night, social media had helped us figure out what went on, although it soon became unreliable–like a game of telephone the information sometimes got distorted: Through a group Facebook chat, friends shared images with me of a possibly fake GoFundMe page for Drew, at the time still considered “missing.” Apparently, someone also used a picture of his mother from a TV interview to create a Facebook account and pass along unsubstantiated information; on Monday afternoon, I found Drew’s name as one of the most recent confirmed deaths.

Condolences and displays of grief flooded all my usual streams, but outside of my feed, there was a vocal, ugly faction of hate. On Twitter and Facebook, people posted messages congratulating the shooter. A tweet by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick read “A man reaps what he sows” above a Bible verse. As friends and family of the victims trawled for answers, they were met by more homophobia and hate—a reason gay clubs such as Pulse are still important to the LGBT community. It’s a place for us to be together, a place where we didn’t need to hide. A place where we were supposed to be free of all that fear and we could just be ourselves.

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